The front door to Maze Books in Rockford, Illinois sticks and bangs with a distinct double-clunking sound. Rather than updating for modern convenience, we have grown to embrace the thudding as the bookshop’s unofficial doorbell. The button on the door handle has to be held down completely or the latch bolt doesn’t clear the strike plate. When that happens, you get the clunking. I’ve used the shop’s label maker twice to make instructions and have attached those instructions directly to the handle, but like most signs, in most shops in America, its existence is hidden in plain view.
The antique door is framed by the limestone walls of what was once a jewelry store, constructed during the Civil War, protected from burrowing and burglars and dynamite. The exterior paintjob is Royal Purple or “like Grimace” depending on who is asked. The violet iron frame grips two large display windows. The first is filled with a springtime display of books on mushrooms, foraging, and homesteading. There is a No Data Center yard sign propped up against the glass. The second window holds a chair, a nightstand, a Maya Angelou book, and a War is not The Answer sign, front-and-center. Stubborn tape from old event flyers reflect sunlight through the glass like scales. There is a broken rusty clock centered above the door. People used to ask about the clock, which I don’t have the time or knowledge to repair, but I don’t think people really pay attention to it anymore. One less problem to fix, for now.
photo credit: James Hogan
The wizardry of the shop begins just inside the door. The interior appears larger on the inside than it should be from the outside. The arched ceiling is stenciled with golden stars in a very economically viable Victorian celestial way. The stars cost me two days on an extension ladder after rolling out four layers of midnight blue paint fully extended. This work burned my back and shoulders like the blue blazes of hell, and I almost fell to my death a few times while painting. I would do it again. The look on the faces of first-time visitors as they enter, just after their first double-clunk, confirms it.
Some of the locals are suspicious of the bookstore when they step in for their first visit. Their questions are generally a mixture of accusations and denial. “Did you just open? How long have you been here? Are you sure?” Other locals are diners with reservations for the pizzeria next door. They usually only browse until they get paged for their table, but occasionally, they’ll come back to purchase something. On the opposite end, people leaving the pizzeria will bring in leftovers, and sometimes they place their takeout boxes on our shelves or on the community resources table, or they’ll designate someone, the person least interested in books, to be the food supervisor. There is an older couple who regularly brings me their pizza leftovers, unsolicited. It’s probably just a simple case of Midwesterners being thoughtful, but it always makes me think that I must not be looking too hot.
Most people browse. Some buy things, others do not. We do get drop-ins from those energy and merchant fee scam salespeople who can’t even muster the strength to pretend to care about literature. Door-to-door salespeople always carry clipboards, so you can usually cut them off at the pass before they make their way over, but if you aren’t vigilant, they’ll spring the hell up on you undetected. I always tell the salespeople my name is Curtis in hopes they’ll repeat this fake name to one of my retail neighbors. “Curtis down at the bookstore is seriously considering becoming a client.”
photo credit: James Hogan
The center of the first floor is where our events take place. We have a weekly chess club, a monthly book club, and a monthly philosophy discussion. The reoccurring events are held in addition to the standard bookstore things like book-signings, poetry readings, socialist meetings, etcetera. We host a chess club every Wednesday night from five to seven. We carry our two library tables and move them against the back of the display windows. The community resources table is put away and we get out the other folding tables, chairs, and sets. Thirteen-year-old Daniel always helps me set up for chess club. His family drives to Rockford every week from a smaller town about forty minutes away. His mother works on her laptop upstairs while he plays. When he was ten or eleven, we used to set up an outdoor table for him to play against overconfident men on dates. He slaughtered them. Great kid.
The sales counter is the shop’s central command center. It is directly in front of an enormous, obsolete vault containing an enormous, obsolete safe, like some sort of busted-ass nesting doll. I am asked about the vault/safe at least once per day, every day, since relocating the bookshop to the jewelry store in 2023. There is nothing interesting in the safe, I can assure you. “That’s where I put the mean customers,” I sometimes joke. The vault and safe are also broken, like the old clock, but what is the point of using a safe if it costs you money?
The wooden counter was pulled out of an old barn about a week before we opened. Some of the most overt political material surrounds the register. Maze Books has never been shy about our politics. “Read Books, Burn Fascists” is the shop’s official motto and we have been printing those words on the backs of our t-shirts since 2022. When we did Printers Row Lit Fest in 2024, we caught a bit of a heat from a couple patrons. One of the customers asked for “our” definition of fascism. We are always referring to right-wing nationalism. “Fake news,” they like to respond. That is their slogan.
This year we went a little further. We pulled out of the annual Rockford Independent Bookstore Crawl event, an annual event that we helped create, which just so happened to be our biggest revenue day of the year. It is gone now.
One of the bookstore crawl vendors was found following numerous right-wing nationalist personalities, including Charlie Kirk. The vendor refused to refute or confirm their position, offering only that they wished to remain “100% politically neutral,” out of fear of losing customers. We had a difficult time accepting this answer. Bookstores are, by nature, political, just as gun stores are political by nature. I would never expect a gun store owner to align politically with the party that wants to remove guns, just as we would never align politically with the party that wants to ban books. We are first amendment advocates and we believe in exercising our rights too. The first amendment is our second amendment. This, of course, is in addition to the numerous human rights violations that must be ignored for the good of the almighty dollar. No thanks. Not worth it. We would rather keep our souls.
photo credit: James Hogan
To the east of the register and vault, there are a dozen or so banker’s boxes full of recently acquired used editions. We stuff the boxes under the mezzanine stairs in an attempt to conceal them from collectors who can smell an unpriced first edition three towns over. The pile under the mezzanine has the Sisyphean ability to replenish itself whenever I make any real shelving progress. The books must flow and a bookseller must never become attached to the books. Shoppers are more than willing to forgive a grumpy owner’s frugal operation as long as that operation consistently stocks a solid inventory.
At the back of the shop, the kid’s section is tucked beside the first step of the mezzanine stairs. Through the exit is our garden, the last shop addition. It butts up against a fairly busy alley that smells like pizza and sounds like dogs howling. You definitely know when it’s feeding time at the no-kill shelter behind us. Sometimes, if I’m bored, I will imply to browsing customers that the howling sound they hear is something else, something horrific. I can get away with this as long as I say, “It’s a no-kill shelter” with a quickness. You gotta read the room beforehand, but it lands like a George Carlin joke–the relief on the customers faces and the laughter afterward usually gives me a little boost.
The customers are more important than the books themselves, but nobody told me this before we opened nearly four years ago. I mean, people probably did, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was daydreaming. I never considered that a career in bookselling would be a retail career because that would have interfered with the daydream and I didn’t want to ruin all the good bookselling things that I also didn’t know anything about. I prepared more than most, but the fact of the matter is that a bookseller can and will (if able) spend a lifetime learning about the job. A Chicago bookstore owner allowed me a few shadow hours at their shop. The first piece of advice she gave me was to have five excuses at the ready at all times. Good advice that I never follow. I wish I could tell you that I don’t have five excuses out of some sort of righteousness, but it is more that I have become accustomed to offering a second perspective along with a double dose of Northern Illinois anxiety. Bookstore conversations are a vital defense against the human experience. They can make or break the universe. Also, I usually don’t have anything better to do.
photo credit: James Hogan
Braided between the conversations are shadows of change and passing years of minor deviation. Some days it’s trying out a variety of gourmet jellybeans with the mail carrier. “Wait until you try the pear one, you’re gonna’ flip.” Some days it’s grieving sons and daughters with their parents’ personal library. It is always incredible to see a collection in one place; a lifetime of books, categorized by existence, shelf by shelf, year by year, page by page. Some days you get Republicans moving away from the Pride flag which always makes me think of vampires and garlic. Other days you get a perfect beam of sun through an adjacent brutalist landscape until you are interrupted by an unmistakable double-clunking noise.
Another conversation, another book for the library, another day of bookselling in modern dystopia.
photo credit: James Hogan
